Lightning is fierce just as she is gorgeous.
When inspiration turns into faith, when faith turns into betrayal, and when betrayal turns into abandonment’s aberration, you might have a problem. As far as release dates go, Final Fantasy had always been an exclusive franchise. The first, the second, the third… the fourth, the fifth, the sixth… the seventh, the eighth, and the ninth: need this go on? Don’t you realize that whenever a Final Fantasy game launches, it is always for a single platform? Yes, Square has walked the “mark now, port later” path over the course of time, but not until slow sales of the PlayStation 3 has Square Enix come to the unthinkable conclusion: end Final Fantasy XIII’s exclusivity. At E3 2008, no one from that day forth would look at Square Enix the same way again. They stomped on the hearts of PlayStation 3 owners, not because the game would no longer arrive on one system, but more so because they would not launch the game until both versions were completed. No one knew of the game’s full status at this point, and no one has since – besides the suits of zipper-lipped industry insiders. Wasn’t the game supposed to be nearing completion by this point? Was there a retooling in effect? How would this affect the game, by catering to cross-platform infrastructures? Moreover, why didn’t Square Enix finish the PlayStation 3 edition off first, port later, and make the gaming world sane again? Whatever the answers may be, we’ll never know. We’ll only know the war that has waged since then, and the truth that now lies ahead with this flagship title’s final release four years in production being finally upon us!
From birth until death, sometimes people are a guiding force to light the way for a purpose. In a world split into two, there exists a place of people called Cocoon that sits above strange outskirts within their busy beehive, a haven away from the land of Pulse. Always led to believe that the creatures that exist in Pulse are fearful by a governing power known as the Sanctum, it is at this point, where a purging of the people is underway. Whosoever undergoes an exposure to a fal’Cie being, or a machine with godly powers is forever more cursed – at least that’s what everyone has no choice but to believe. When something is unknown, cowardice sets in. When the exact same something happens to someone close, the situation becomes clear that you’ve got to set things right and break a few laws. Rebelling against the Sanctum’s army, six heroes stand for a cause that only leads them all to the farthest reaches, as an l’Cie, or a person who has a chosen destiny that doesn‘t come with instructions. Now the choice to decide on what that path may be is beckoning, whether they’re to protect the army that seeks to destroy them or to save themselves.
There are two kinds of stunningly calibrated visuals out there: the ones that impress and the ones that do not. While one breaks ground, the other just sits there looking pretty. While the other has a jackhammer, the other reads a book. Final Fantasy XIII looks good, but really does nothing to prove it. Where other Final Fantasy games have scooped out miles in order to arouse, it’s as if Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t. Expressively, other video games released throughout this generation look better only because they carry a “wow” factor when they bring food home to the table. Final Fantasy XIII may look nice, but it’s not going to amaze in the same way that previous entries have. Behind you and in front, the sides and all other environmental adjacents are made up of mountainous canyons to cross through, of drab enemy tank, crate, and sewer-routed camp to sneak by, and even a botanical and evening-brushed city to circle around as the rollercoaster of the future spins on by. Some environments have people in them, and some do not. Some environments have light traces of water to witness a splash effect spring up as you walk over it, and others do not. For the most part, Final Fantasy XIII’s environments don’t stand out very well at all. Along the way, you may notice the enormous backdrops, like where liquid weaves a tad in the ocean next to a plain beach or some blocked gates with a crowd of AI people just hanging around on the other side. From the look to the lack of a richer set of textures… as neatly knit as the game’s sewing job proves, this has to be one of the worst looking Final Fantasy games in existence.
Someone must be thirsty.
Additionally, that’s just saying that Final Fantasy XIII is a disappointment on the Wile-o-meter. Its ability to stand head and shoulder against its brethren in the form of slamming down on impact factor is weak sauce. Final Fantasy XIII is still a nice looking game, depressing as it has turned out. Character models are fine, you’ll think. Well, actually some interesting design choices made it in, especially for the game’s lead protagonist. Named Lightning, she’s a sassy sort. Her hair being combed and hanging all down her face, her red cape attached to one shoulder blade as the sword’s carrying case wags back and forth from behind… it’s unique.
Snow’s facial hair spread stands out on a strong jaw line, a face buried in a cap, and an overcoat dangles with shredded edging. If anything deserves your focus the most, the cut of characters would be it. Battle windows are effective all the same. You’ll have flames zipping across the screen and electrical balls of energy motioning toward you. Blades sweep enemies into the skies, and guns blast along the bottom, as characters jump around and become knocked down, reacting to how brutal each sequence plays itself out. Best of all is likely the summon spells, where rose petals flutter around in one particular movie sequence as your white knight comes galloping in to save the day.
Messy face: does the mouth lead or follow? Final Fantasy games have had failings before in the sound department, particularly on music’s sliding scale – just like a piano. Notes pile up sweetly and they tumble down into darker depths. The Final Fantasy musical maestro Nobuo Uematsu hasn’t been a permanent staple in the series for nearly a decade. This legend has composed the greats, and he is not the reason why Final Fantasy XIII’s soundtrack sours in certain parts. There’s actually quite a bit of diversity in the song selections, as rock, electronic, instrumental, and even some songs with words falling into place. In total, this composition comes across both soundly and strangely. When you’re listening to a jazzy harmonica motif strewn in the background, that’s when you start to feel less respect for the game‘s irregularity. Compared to this section, conceivably the rest of the lot isn’t as unfavorable. Audio is a stranger to being in danger, for this aspect happens to have no significant follies. Footsteps differentiate between surfaces, gunshots and magical attacks burst out and crackle where they should and other noises pitch in correctly, whether foot soldiers are charging in on your position from behind the bend or a levitating enemy’s rocket pack gusts right toward you.
Strong vocals tell of the main cast. Distinctive and appropriate matchups happens to be the calling for the talent at work, from Hope’s fervent quiet to Vanille’s spunky British accent that will keep your ears dialed in. On the other hand, Square Enix decided to create the first Final Fantasy that would open the gates to fully voiced NPCs. Each person in a crowd that you run by, who isn’t an enemy, is going to say something whenever you get close. In the earlier Final Fantasy games, the people that you would talk to would have text boxes prompting their thoughts.
"No contest! Cloud's weapon is waaay more enormous."
They had stuff integrated in the story that you would want to read about, no matter how minor it was. Instead, here Final Fantasy XIII’s objective is to feed the full details of the game into your understanding only through data logs that will update, as you get further into the story. If it’s not a part of the allotted playtime and you have to spend time away from the game within the menu system browsing off-course, you might be thinking that instead Square should have just kept the text in the game. After all, the only sentences those NPCs have mutters through generic speech patterns that are unimportant, and more so are sometimes hard to hear when the music overshadows its softness anyhow.
The role-playing genre that gamers cared about ten years ago hasn’t been the same for some while. Final Fantasy X is the last of the “main” Final Fantasy series to engage enemies’ row-to-tow, switching turns and strategizing with traditional, tactical turn-based bliss. Final Fantasy XII arrived six years afterward, already past the point where a non-standard sequel had arrived. The twelfth installment hiked up the action in a period where Western role-playing games were flooding the market. This was an approach to diminish the count of seconds that battle time would commence, as unlike in previous games load times and summon spells were drenched in minutes rather than seconds. The gaming community spoke out, and Square Enix listened. Final Fantasy XIII takes its chops from Final Fantasy XII in battle formation, but in other regards, the game draws its energy from all over the Final Fantasy map.
Take Final Fantasy XII. Just like it, enemies appear on the battlefield ahead of time where each encounter initiates upon your ability to run toward the fiend(s) and make contact. A few things to keep in mind about this approach are that it’s best drawing near the monster only when it has its back turned to your front. Getting a jump on the enemy is what lands a player into a preemptive strike, or the chance to precociously attack. One problem with this ploy is that you won’t always know when a creature has its back turned or not. Is this thing with a fin covering looking my way or the opposite way? Where is this glowing ball’s frontal lobe located? While immense dragon-like beings, humanoid soldiers, and tigeriffic classes are on the easier end of dissolving the situation, another small issue presents itself with the scale of the battlefield. If you’re a Final Fantasy aficionado, or at least have some small recollective knowledge of the series, it’s widely known that towns, NPCs, mini-games, weapon shops, inns, sidequests, and other such significant properties were a rather large backbone of any, every, and all Final Fantasy operations… until now.
Final Fantasy XIII is the final Fantasy to make use of such well-known franchise conventions as exploration, as the game has for the most part trimmed down its bloated waist. Aside from a couple of “activities,” such as smashing rows of enemies with a mech or chasing after a Chocobo, most of the game is entirely spent following long drawn out trails that ever so slightly deter, only to venture down yet another walled-off path. You’ll miss the pit stops. You’ll miss the dynamic conversations when reaching a villain’s lair, having them being a constant rather than a distant strain on the story. Final Fantasy XIII’s plot is mainly rehearsed between the collaboration of some same and then some differentiating “chosen” who often get separated on their travels, split up for a narrative that switches between each personality’s backstory as well as the one ahead.
There is a point to this, though. In such condensed environments, it’s impossible to ensure that a precedent strike occurs at all times, as narrow hollows paint a portrait that holds little space for honing in on your enemy’s buttocks. These aren’t wide valleys; they’re scrutinizing routes that only veer off into handfuls of extra space for additional monsters to fight and/or floating treasure balls to pry open occasionally. Tracking the condition upon which each battle ensues probably isn’t as important as knowing how to progress through one, though. Final Fantasy XIII’s system acts similarly and adversely from what’s familiar in a Final Fantasy. Starting out you’ll be able to select your character’s standard attacks from an “Abilities” menu. Diversely, automating your confrontational agenda means that manual choice drops the length that it takes for a player to choose, and randomly generates a plotted list of offensive commands all for you at the press of a button. Some of what you’ll need to know is that once a battle starts, everything is in real-time. Fingering an attack method or an item from the categorical menu won’t halt the enemy’s advances. Another thing is that all attacks base off an ATB gauge, or Active Time Battle.
Switching classes and formulating diverse attacks is key.
Each time that a battle input manifests, it’s on the left-hand side of the screen where you’ll notice the meter ascending. This is your blood, your food, or your fuel for issuing commands. Each time that an attack is ordered, the gauge will go back to zero and begin its climb all over. Simple, except for the times enemy forces will toughen – and they will. Each of your opposition and you has a health meter designating detection from how much juice there is in the tank, but furthermore also has something brand-new: the stagger bar. Cut them, shoot them, or set them aflame – harming an enemy enough times, in other words, will eventually increase a yellow bar right underneath the amount of green that dictates how much left there is of it that you need to destroy. Once the stagger meter fills up enough, this turns an enemy on top of their game into a stumbling fool that’s about to be shamed. Effectively, each subsequent strike causes them to suffer greater damage – but this all happens only until the yellow bar completes its rate of depletion.
Complexity isn’t always free in this world, not even from Final Fantasy standards. Adapting to Final Fantasy XIII doesn’t happen Lightning-fast. Through a series of tutorial sessions and descriptions setup over time, you’ll be approximately ten hours into the story until the game actually starts to become translucent. Only then will the fuzz fall off and only then will everything start to become available – including essential elements like upgrades and summon spells. Summons are another huge chunk of battle whenever necessary. Defined as Eidolons in this Fantasy, you’ll only come across these ethereal giants at given points during your adventures, and these duels are certainly trying to overcome. Beating a summon means that you’ll have to appeal to their weakness in a set time limit, whether you’re to shield and/or attack to boost the meter that makes them meet their soon-to-be master: you. You’re bound to fail in capturing one, at least once. Having done so, you’ll dispose of TP (no, not toilet paper), or Technical Points, whenever calling upon their thunder. Using Eidolons in combat will also clear away whoever else is in your character’s party, as private conversations are apparently what are in an Eidolon’s best interest. Fighting alongside the summon is where their purple Gestalt gauge starts its descent, otherwise known as a limit for how much screen time they have between their arrival and departure. You’ll also have the option to combine forces with an Eidolon and dispense points through a secondary button-tapping sequence, pounding on the face buttons multiple times in a row to deal extra damage for the likes of bosses that need it. At this stage, you’ll view a main character hopping on the back of Odin, whose transformation is that of a horse. All summons are more than meets the eye – they’re transportational bodies in disguise, decidedly an unexpected twist for the series.
There is of course more about the battles than just swinging a sword around and magically spelling death. Every time that you exit the battle screen, one thing that you won’t have to worry about is constantly stocking up on potions, antidotes, or other status relievers. Health (or HP) always has its clock automatically rewound. The same goes for poison and other such determents. TP (which essentially replaces the magic system) is the only one that doesn’t regenerate. To regain TP, you’ll have to battle hard, battle fast, and battle well. Fights with smaller durations are the ones that will net players a larger count of stars, which along with Crystarium Points (CP) and items/components are ratings designed to elevate your course. The TP count refuels with every star earned. It helps that the reward of money is nowhere to be found after battle, because after all currency is nowhere to be found in this game except for the rare occurrences when it is.
He's either hungry, or he's yawning.
Otherwise, you would have the funding to buy several things, with the long list of items that are of great importance at times. Rather, you won’t be receiving many health-generating potions, character-reviving phoenix downs, or components that not only are useful for upgrading weapon/accessories but also are extravagantly expensive in comparison to the little money that nestles into your possession. From time to time money, or in this case Gil, can be stuffed in a treasure ball or otherwise will be available when you’ll find yourself selling off goods during desperate times. Final Fantasy XIII is just like Final Fantasy XII in that Gil isn’t yours after battle, but unlike Final Fantasy XII, there aren’t any monster hunts to participate in… at least not directly for cash. You’ll suffer ever so slightly for losing all of your money while buying expensive things when they start to run out, and it shouldn’t be this way.
In some regards, it’s fair to say that Final Fantasy has stifled, while it’s obvious that from another perspective number thirteen is simply branching out into newer regions. Final Fantasy XIII’s experience system comes off as approachable and foreign at the same time. Easy as can be, the CP acronym as mentioned earlier is a point system that pays its way as often as you want it to, and you will want it to. If you’re thirsting for more health, strength in magic or attacks, or more to the point new abilities, then you’ll have to spend accrued Crystarium Points on a leveling wheel that constantly elevates. From the in-game menu, the “Crystarium” submenu spans across one or eventually multiple character classes. Swapping out classes on the fly is possible during combat just so you know, whether you want your team to have a medic curing the weak or a synergist provoking enemies and defensively bolstering your party so that the team has a divisionary moment to catch up. Character classes are a part of a paradigm system, which in itself has entry to customization so that you get to choose which classes come with you on the field of battle and in what order. When leveling your characters through the Crystarium page, it’s here where connected lines spin into wheels, which are all dotted with colored crystals along the way. Some crystals follow along the path while others branch out. The idea is that in order to upgrade your character’s class, you’ll have to hold down on ‘X’ so to spread the points. So long as you’re holding the button, a brightened line will curl around the paths, dispensing points, and embedding your characters’ with more options during a fight. Choosing where to spend points is all up to the player. Where you spend them, how you spend them: these obligations don’t matter as much as when you spend them, as the Crystarium experience system is straightforward just like playing the game itself.
Are you talking to me? Because if you are, I've got a joke. Two rabbis walk into a barber shop. Get it?
Four years incoming, it shouldn’t have taken as long as it has to finalize Final Fantasy XIII. Somewhere along the lines, Square Enix must have stopped dead in their tracks to lose faith in a ship with one major leak. Bon voyage to the PlayStation 3 crowd, Square Enix parties that night on Microsoft Isle, only to write Sony while they patched things up on their end with a more able-bodied crew (more customers) and a vaster supply of eats and treats (more wonderful software). All the while sleeping drunkenly on Microsoft’s smelly barge, Square Enix awoke one day to finish what they started on another platform by splitting it down the middle. Servicing two halves, we have now some news that could set aside the differences that make or break the decision that you should decide upon when asking yourself if this game is really worth your time. The bad news is that this beloved franchise has lost its luster. The bad news is that the visual quality has been diminished so to accommodate an inferior model. The bad news is that essentially Square Enix would not allow PlayStation 3 owners a different game than what could have been. If given the time, Final Fantasy XIII could have been way more, way better. Scrapping the original game engine for another would leave one to believe that Final Fantasy XIII is not the game intended for us all of this time. Setting hope aside and living with what we’ve got, you’ve been waiting for “Final Fantasy XIII b.” this long… might as well give in and play on.
